TSA Doesn't Care That Its Luggage Locks Have Been Hacked
In a spectacular failure of a "back door" designed to give law enforcement exclusive access to private places, hackers have made the "master keys" for Transportation Security Administration-recognized luggage locks available to anyone with a 3D printer.
The TSA-recognized luggage locks were a much-vaunted solution to a post-9/11 conundrum: how to let people lock their luggage, on the one hand, but let the TSA inspect it without resorting to bolt cutters, on the other.
When the locks were first introduced in 2003, TSA official Ken Lauterstein described them as part of the agency’s efforts to develop "practical solutions that contribute toward our goal of providing world-class security and world-class customer service."
Now that they’ve been hacked, however, TSA says it doesn’t really care one way or another.
This doesn't surprise me very much. I'm actually kind of surprised that it took this long for the TSA master keys to be leaked out to the Internet. It does, however, bother me that TSA's response is that since it "does not create a threat to aviation security" they don't care.